Marquette Warrior

We are here to provide an independent, rather skeptical view of events at Marquette University. Comments are enabled on most posts, but extended comments are welcome and can be e-mailed to jmcadams2@juno.com. E-mailed comments will be treated like Letters to the Editor.
This site has no official connection with Marquette University. Indeed, when University officials find out about it, they will doubtless want it shut down.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Academic Gadfly Mike Adams to Speak at Marquette Thursday Night

In the best academic tradition, the Marquette College Republicans tried to set up a debate on the abortion issue, asking one of the most famous abortion supporters in the nation, Marquette’s own Dan Maguire, and gadfly columnist and conservative academic Mike Adams to represent the opposing sides.

But when Maguire found out that he was going to debate Adams, he backed out.

Maguire claimed he refused to debate because Adams is not a theologian, although Maguire has debated non-theologians before.

So Adams will be speaking about abortion this Thursday night (March 1).

The program is titled “A Matter of Life and Death,” and will be held in the AMU Ballrooms at 7:00 p.m.

Dan Maguire: Just a Short Step From Atheism?

There are many shepherds today who act like sheep, along with many wolves who pose as shepherds. Daniel Maguire is a case in point. In Whose Church? A Concise Guide to Progressive Catholicism, the ethics professor from Marquette University poses as a shepherd guiding us to an alternative Catholic Church, one that can exist without a pope and bishops.

Let’s start with Maguire’s acknowledgments: He gives abject thanks to Planned Parenthood for lavishing “awards” on him and inviting him to present “keynote addresses at the annual events of at least a third of their 130 affiliates.” Oh, how he loves them: “Being with them has always infused the blood of hope into my veins.” Yes, the blood of hope. Well, that group indeed has a lot of blood to spare, since it is up to its neck in it. It’s definitely not “the blood of hope,” however, but the blood that crieth to Heaven from the earth (Gen. 4). Then Maguire gives an accolade to Mar­quette (run by the Jesuits) for defending his academic freedom “almost perfectly” for 35 years. What this implies is that they defended his “freedom” to teach the opposite of the Church’s moral theology, as he has done, on contraception, masturbation, pre-marital sex, homosexuality, abortion, and embryonic stem-cell research.

Maguire is a virtual atheist. He praises the priest-shaman Thomas Berry for saying that the natural world, not the Bible, is the “primary revelation of the divine.” Then Ma­guire denies divine providence with a scoff: Although Vatican I declared that God protects and governs all things with sweetness and strength, “the tumultuous rise and fall of stars” seen in the Hubble Telescope reveals that the process is not “under sweet management.” Richard Dawkins could not have written with more contempt against a compassionate God. In addition, while posing as a Catholic, Maguire denies the dogmas of our Lord’s virgin birth and our Blessed Mother’s perpetual virginity. He laments that 83 percent of Americans “believe in the literal virgin birth of Jesus, even though Bible scholars see this as metaphoric,” and claims that Mary saw “two of her sons, Jesus and James,” killed as “rebels.” He also presents Christ’s divinity as an invention: In orthodox Christianity “a human male was divinized” and “Goddess images vigorously suppressed.”

Besides this, Maguire uses vulgar expressions to heap scorn upon Catholic bishops. He says that they keep “bleating about their pelvic obsessions, abortion, and same-sex marriage.” In wanting to consign homosexuals to a life of chastity, he adds, they are not as Catholic as he is: “The view that homosexual people are condemned to involuntary celibacy for life is as cruel as it is absurd. And it is very Catholic to say so.”

He instructs the bishops that on abortion, too, they are not as Catholic as he is: “The Roman Catholic position on abortion is pluralistic and always has been.” Of course, this is a downright lie, but it is one that Maguire has repeated for several decades, with impunity. The difference here is that he is boldly shoving it down the bishops’ throats by saying that “if bishops don’t know that, there is a cure for their ignorance: they can be sent back to school.” What school? In his book he refers favorably to Daniel Dom­browski and Robert Deltete of the Jesuit University of Seattle, who promote the myth of a “pluralistic” Catholic tradition on abortion.

So here we have the wolf lecturing the shepherds on the proper way to tend their sheep. Maguire has the temerity to do this because he sees them as no braver than their sheep. For years he has dared them with his shenanigans to excommunicate him, but they have only rapped him gently on the knuckles and left him at his post, as professor of moral theology at Marquette. He mocks them now by taking a dogmatic tone and exhorting them to study their own tradition.

Oh, he is not entirely against bishops. He speaks patronizingly of their “great leadership potential” if only they would promote environmentalism: “Think of it. Bishops are theater. They are opera, and people like a bit of pomp and circumstance.” Yes, bishops have their place if they will stick to being theatrical ad-men for progressive Catholicism. Maguire gloats that, on contraception, many of them long ago left behind the “narrow” Vatican way to embrace the “broader and richer Catholic theology.” What he forgets here is that our Lord Himself called the road to Heaven “narrow” and the road to Hell “broad” (Mt. 7:13).

On Church history, the ex-priest Maguire again echoes the scoffs of atheists. He speaks of “the macho takeover of the church that eventually followed Jesus’ death,” and of Constantine’s establishment of the Church as a “shotgun marriage” that “joined Jesus to state-sponsored violence,” so that “Jesus got a new career as a warlord.” After this, Maguire ignorantly lumps together the Dark Ages and the high Middle Ages, writing that “Christendom became a cauldron of violence as the so-called barbarians arrived…. The violence that could not be subdued was diverted into the Crusades.” If this is what he taught his own family, is it any wonder that his son and grandchildren are now Muslims — something Maguire appears to celebrate in this book?

Whose Church? would be a work beneath our notice if the author had not been teaching moral theology at a Catholic university for over three decades. In Maguire’s account, “progressive Catholicism” is only a short step from atheism.

- Anne Barbeau Gardiner

Maguire should come out and honestly say he’s an atheist.

But he won’t, and that’s because his shtick is claiming to be a Catholic theologian so he can tell people that blowing off the teaching of the Church and thinking and acting just like secular people is perfectly Catholic.

There is a substantial audience for that position. But the Church should not be pandering to those people.

Friday, February 24, 2012

Global Warmists: Lie, Cheat, Steal

The promoters of the global warming hysteria never really recovered from Climategate, the release of e-mails and data which demonstrated that climate insiders were using questionable data, promoting misleading arguments, and conspiring to block dissenting views from the scientific literature. It was a fatal blow to the credibility of the warmists, and it has been followed by a steady stream of distinguished scientists standing up publicly to withdraw their backing from the global warming “consensus.” The latest example is an op-ed by sixteen such scientists in the Wall Street Journal, followed up by a devastating response to their critics.

The global warming alarmists are losing the argument, and the latest scandal—James Delingpole calls it Fakegate—shows just how desperate they have become.

This was supposed to be a scandal that would undermine the global warming skeptics. In fact, it was supposed to be an exact parallel of Climategate, but this time discrediting the Heartland Institute, a pro-free-market think tank in Chicago that has been a leader in debunking the global warming hysteria.

Someone calling himself “Heartland Insider” released a series of internal documents from Heartland. On the whole, the documents were unremarkable. They revealed that a think tank which advocates the free market and is skeptical of global warming was raising money to, um, advocate the free market and promote skepticism of global warming. As Delingpole put it, “Run it next to the story about the Pope being caught worshipping regularly in Rome and the photograph of a bear pooping behind a tree.”

But there was one document, a “confidential strategy memo” that provided more inflammatory material, including an admission that one of Heartland’s programs is aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science.” See, those evil global warming deniers really are anti-science!

But if you are an actual global warming skeptic, this is a big red flag, because we skeptics view ourselves as the defenders of science who are trying to protect it from corruption by an anti-capitalist political agenda. We never, in our own private discussions, refer to ourselves as discouraging the teaching of science. Quite the contrary.

This is the dead giveaway that the “confidential strategy memo” is a fake, and that is what the real scandal has become. The Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle helped break this open with an initial post raising questions, as well as a detailed follow-up. McArdle gets a little too far into the weeds of information technology, not to mention grammar and English usage, but the basic issue is that the “meta-data” in the Heartland files—data marking when the documents were created, on what machines, in what format, and in what time zone—don’t match. Most of the documents were created directly as PDFs from a word-processing program, while the supposed “confidential strategy memo” was printed and then scanned. The genuine Heartland files were created weeks earlier in the central time zone, while the incriminating memo was created very shortly before the release of the documents and in the Pacific time zone. This corroborates Heartland’s claim that the document is a fake.

McArdle also points out that the “confidential strategy memo” consists almost completely of facts and wording lifted from the other files, with the inflammatory quotes pasted in between in an inconsistent style. Moreover, some of the facts from the other files are used inaccurately. For example, the memo claims that money from the Koch brothers—central figures in any good leftist conspiracy theory—was being used to support Heartland’s global warming programs, when it was actually earmarked for their health-care policy work. That’s something a real Heartland insider would know; only a warmist creating a fake document would get it wrong.

So it was pretty obvious that the “confidential strategy memo” was not a Heartland document at all but a fraud pasted together after the fact by someone who wanted to discredit Heartland, but who didn’t know enough about IT to cover his tracks.

Note one other thing: how this fraud self-consciously tries to recreate every aspect of the Climategate scandal, projecting those elements onto the climate skeptics. Climategate had: a) an insider who leaked information, b) private admissions of unscientific practices, like misrepresenting the data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and c) discussions of attempts to suppress opposing views. Further scandals that followed on from Climategate included one more element: d) using material from non-scientists in activist groups to pad out scientific reports for the UN.

The fake Heartland memo tried to re-create all of this. It was posted to the Web by someone who called himself “Heartland Insider.” It contains admissions of things like opposing the teaching of science. It includes discussion of attempts to exclude global warming alarmists from the media, particularly an attempt to oust a fellow named Peter Gleick, described in the memo as a “high profile climate scientist,” from his Forbes blog, because “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.” And it describes a program to hire a “paid team of writers” to “undermine the official United Nation’s [sic] IPCC reports.” So this has all of the elements of Climategate, but in mirror image.

But it is all a lie. It took bloggers mere days to spot the document as a fake and less than a week to find the person who posted it and the other Heartland documents. He turns out to be...Peter Gleick, a climate scientist who is president of the left-leaning Pacific Institute. It’s actually kind of pathetic, when you think about it. What gave Gleick away was the little touch of self-aggrandizement, the fact that he couldn’t resist over-inflating the significance of his Forbes blog. In his own mind, clearly, he is the one man whose bold opposition keeps the Heartland leadership awake at nights.

So the “leaker” wasn’t an insider, Heartland has not been exposed as anti-science, and it is not conspiring to silence opposing voices. In fact, days before the documents were posted, Heartland had asked Gleick to participate in a debate, and he refused the invitation. Oh, and those “paid writers” who were supposed to “undermine” the UN climate reports? They were actually a team of distinguished scientists who were compiling their own independent climate research.

After he was caught, Gleick confessed, but he’s still trying the “modified limited hangout”: confess to a small crime in the hope that this will mollify investigators and they won’t dig up evidence of your big crime. So Gleick has confessed to obtaining the genuine Heartland documents through deceptive means. (He called Heartland posing as a member of the institute’s board and talked a gullible junior staffer into sending him the handouts for an upcoming board meeting.) But he still maintains that the fake “confidential strategy memo” was sent to him by an anonymous source, and that he only obtained the Heartland documents in an attempt to verify the memo.

This won’t hold up, because Gleick still doesn’t understand the meta-data that tripped him up. The fake strategy memo was created about a day before the documents were released, which appears to be well after Gleick pilfered the genuine documents. That fits with McArdle’s impression that the fake memo was created by cutting and pasting facts from the other documents. Which implies that Gleick was the forger.

All of this will come out, and in a much fuller way than in the Climategate scandal. With Climategate, the victim of the fraud was the public, which pays the salaries of the scientists who have been fudging the facts. But this means that the government and its scientific institutions were put in charge of the investigation, and they had a vested interest in whitewashing the story. In this case, the victims are Heartland and other independent scientists whose reputations were impugned by the forged document. They have a good criminal and civil case against Gleick for identity theft, fraud, and defamation, and they will be able to use the courts’ subpoena power to dig into Gleick’s computer records and get to the whole truth. So he’s now going to suffer the same fate as John Edwards: admit part of his wrongdoing but cover up the rest, then be forced to admit more, then a little bit more. It’s the most ignominious way to go down.

Which means, for us skeptics, that it’s time to pass around the popcorn and enjoy the show.

Oh, and it gets better. Some global warming alarmists are lining up to defend Gleick. Judith Curry points to the blog where Gleick posted the fake memo, which is now declaring, “For his courage, his honor, and for performing a selfless act of public service, [Gleick] deserves our gratitude and applause.” Another warmist adds that Gleick “is the hero and Heartland remains the villain. He will have many people lining up to support him.”

I certainly hope so. A lot of people deserve to go down along with Gleick.

Even many of those who deplore Gleick’s fraud are still willfully blind to its implications. In Time, Bryan Walsh laments that “Worst of all—at least for those who care about global warming—Gleick’s act will almost certainly produce a backlash against climate advocates at a politically sensitive moment. And if the money isn’t already rolling into the Heartland Institute, it will soon.” So yet another warmist has been exposed as a fraud—and the worst thing that can happen is that this will reduce the credibility of the warmists? But they deserve to lose their credibility.

Fakegate shows us, with the precision of a scientific experiment, several key truths about the global warming movement. It shows that most warmists, both the scientists and the journalists, will embrace any claim that seems to bolster their cause, without bothering to check the facts or subject them to rigorous investigation. (Anthony Watts notes how few journalists bothered to contact him before reporting the claims about him that are made in the fake memo.) And it shows us that warmists like Gleick have no compunction about falsifying information to promote their agenda, and that many other warmists are willing to serve as accomplices after the fact, excusing Gleick’s fraud on the grounds that he was acting in a “noble cause.” It shows us that “hide the decline” dishonesty is a deeply ingrained part of the corporate culture of the global warming movement.

Gleick wasn’t just an obscure, rogue operator in the climate debate. Before his exposure, his stock in trade was lecturing on “scientific integrity,” and until a few days ago he was the chairman of the American Geophysical Union’s Task Force on Scientific Ethics. So this scandal goes to the very top of the global warming establishment, and it compels honest observers to ask: if the warmists were willing to deceive us on this, what else have they been deceiving us about?

Between Climategate and Fakegate, the warmist establishment now has zero credibility, and we must call all of their claims into question.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Still Another Campus Racial Hoax

LITTLE FALLS — Two Montclair State University students who reported racist graffiti written on their dorm room door are facing charges after campus police determined they were actually responsible for the message, authorities said.

Olivia McCrae and Tanasia Linton, both 19 and from Newark, were arrested on campus Tuesday afternoon and charged with making false reports, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct, according to the university.

The arrests came a week after the roommates reported a hateful message aimed at African-Americans and women scrawled in marker on their door at the Heights residence complex Feb. 7.

As we have said before, if the hothouse liberal atmosphere of college campuses did not promise such large rewards for racial (and gay, and Hispanic) grievances, these sorts of things would be much less common.

Supposed hate incidents should be cause for criminal investigation, not a lot of rhetoric and questionable “initiatives.”

The Sociology and Politics of Global Warming

At the end of last year, the media widely trumpeted the “recantation” by Richard Muller, a physics professor at Berkeley. Muller’s confession of faith was met with the unreserved glee of fanatics who believe that conversion equals validation of the True Faith. Now Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a prominent German chemistry professor and green activist, announced that he is coming out with a book breaking with the Warmist view. Naturally, this recantation wouldn’t receive nearly the same prominence, except when the inevitable stories kick in about Vahrenholt being a tool of the oil companies.

But set aside the partisan bickering, and one professor accepting a view he had formerly rejected, while another rejects a view he had formerly accepted, is all part of the normal scientific debate. The journey from hypothesis to rock solid consensus is a long one, and it doesn’t end just because Al Gore makes a documentary or a few ads show crying polar bears. Positions are argued, minds change and then a century later the graduate students have fun mocking the ignorance of both sides. That’s science.

Unfortunately, the Cult of Warm doesn’t accept that there is a debate. As far as they are concerned, the debate never happened because it never needed to happen because they were always right. They can’t intelligently address dissent, because their science is not based on discovering the evidence needed to lead to a consensus, but on insisting that there is a consensus and that accordingly there is no need to debate the evidence.

In an ordinary scientific debate, a professor leaving one side and joining another might occasion some recriminations and name calling, but it wouldn’t make him anathema. But like being gay or Muslim, hopping on board the Warm Train makes you a permanent member, and there is no room for changing your mind. Once a Warmist, always a Warmist. That’s not a rational position, but then the Cult of Warm is not a rational faith.

Scientific debates have often had big stakes for human philosophy, but Global Warming is one of the few whose real world implications are as big as its philosophical consequences. At stake is nothing less than the question of whether the human presence on earth is a blight or a blessing, and whether every person must be tightly regulated by a global governance mechanism for the sake of saving the planet.

The Warmists have pushed their agenda through with alarmist claims and hysteria. They have flown jets around the world to argue that everyone must be taxed for their carbon footprint. They have smeared and intimidated anyone who stood up to them. That is not the behavior of people arguing over numbers. It’s a battle of much larger ideas.

If you believe that freedom is at the core of what it means to be human, then the Warmists and what they stand for are instinctively repulsive to you. On the other hand, if you believe that human society must be organized into a moral collective for the betterment of all, then the Warmist idea provides a wake up call compelling us to form into ranks and goose step in recycled rubber boots into the green future.

It’s an exaggeration, but that’s what debates over the proper role of man tend to become. We don’t fight wars over temperature gradients. The passions on both sides are motivated by much larger issues. This isn’t science, it’s the continuing battle over industrialization, the modern society and the rights of the individual dressed up in the garb of theory. And just as a debate over the IQs of minorities will never be a dispassionate inquiry, neither will a debate over whether the world would be better off if we never existed– which is the theme of the environmentalist movement.

The place of man in the university not a question that science can answer, but like so many other controversial issues in the past, it can be aided by manufacturing a scientific consensus that supports one position or another. Nor would this be the first time that science was used in this fashion. It takes a great deal of humility to look outward without prejudging what is out there. When that humility is lacking, then instead of seeing what is out there, the learned doctors and professors come away seeing what is inside them instead.

That unfortunately is what the debate is actually about. The world is not in any danger, but human beings are, as usual, wrangling over their theories of how the world should be.

The debate is not a purely philosophical one. As with all debates about the nature of man, there’s a creed and money at stake. If the Warmists win, then the environmentalist movement takes another step forward to creating a post-religious spiritual crisis for which they have the solution, and a mandate for virtually unlimited power over mankind, over every nation and every individual. That power translates into concrete wealth, which many of the “experts” are already experiencing. But their investments are on the ground floor of what is supposed to be a “green” revolution which will see everyone taxed to save us from ourselves.

It’s hard to be dispassionate when the success or failure of your theory has tremendous implications for your career, your wealth, the status of your field and the triumph of your worldview over all mankind. People have murdered for less. Forging a few graphs and demonizing the opposition is small potatoes by comparison.

A creed needs a crisis. An “If This Goes On” warning that ends in doom, Armageddon and cats and dogs living together in sin. Without an actual deity, the only curses available to environmentalists are those of science. And so they pronounce their curses in science’s name, which is an inconvenience when they fail to come true. An inconvenience that damages the credibility of actual research. But having cast aside reasoned inquiry, the Cult of Warm has no use for science except as a totem to wave over the crowd. They don’t want to be the seekers for knowledge, but the exclusive possessors of absolute truths. And that isn’t how science works.

Like Wall Street, Global Warming has gotten too big to fail. Too many prominent names have committed to it. Too many serious people have nodded their heads and accepted it as an obvious truth, who would be unacceptably embarrassed if it were proven that the whole thing was nothing more than a giant prank. Too many business leaders and governments have invested serious money into it to just shake it off. And much of American and European policy-making is now routed through Global Warming.

No matter what research emerges, the edifice of the lie cannot be allowed to come down. It might be reshaped a little, chiseled on the side, painted over in places, but it can never be toppled, because too much else would come down with it. Global Warming has become the Berlin Wall not only of the left, but of the entire establishment.

If the Cult of Warm were to come tumbling down, then the first victim of it would be the technocratic society built on an unreasonable confidence in experts and Harvard men who always know what they’re doing and know how to do it better than we do. Suddenly all those smart people would no longer seem so smart at all and our Republic of the New Deal and New Frontier would be revealed for a cluster of corrupt gullible idiots who are no better at running things than anyone else would be in their place.

The worst thing you can call a presidential candidate is stupid, not because they aren’t — most of them are — but because the present regime is built on convincing us that we have surrendered our freedom to a meritocracy of the best and the brightest. People who don’t make mistakes because they have gone to all the right schools, read all the right books and nod in all the right places. If people were to realize that their only actual skill is convincingly arguing positions based on talking points with no ability to think outside the box or evaluate the merits of the system, rather than the argument, then the regime would never be the same again.

The way the system actually works is that experts tell leaders what to think, the leaders tell the lobbyists what to think, the lobbyists tell the advisers, who tell the politicians, and then the politicians get up on stage, beam their brightest smile, and tell us what to think. Compared to the absurdity of this pipeline foisting a disastrous philosophy on the world in the name of saving the planet from humanity, discovering that all the banks were playing with imaginary money is positively benign.

Global Warming is not just a failure of a sizable chunk of the scientific establishment to put theory before ideology, it represents a failure of the entire process by which the West has been governed for a frightening number of years. It is a demonstration of how a handful of people in prominent positions can push through otherwise unacceptable measures by manufacturing a crisis and pipelining it through business and government. It’s a hack of our entire system of government.

If you understand the implications of that, then you begin to understand the consequences of it for the progressive technocracy and its mindless elitism that uses opinion leaders to drive actual leaders and has entire agencies dedicated to influencing opinion leaders. If Warmism fails, then it all fails. There will be no mobs in the street or squares filled with protesters, instead the entire infrastructure whose entire purpose is not to look stupid, will suddenly look very stupid.

Stupid leaders might not be too much of a problem in a democracy where people are entitled to elect any idiot they want, but it’s unacceptable in a technocracy where the leaders may win elections, but mostly they win the consensus of the elites. If the elites and their technocracy no longer amount to anything, then the emperor is naked, and suddenly elections might start mattering again.

Mr. Gingrich has frequently attacked President Obama as a “food stamp president” and claimed that African Americans are content to collect welfare benefits rather than pursue employment.

But what did Santorum actually say?

“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”

As for Gingrich, the manifesto provides no citation for his statement, but the following is typical of what he has been saying:

You don’t get out of 9.2% unemployment, you don’t get out of — today it was announced [that] the largest number of Americans [are] on food stamps in history. I’ve said now for six months, this is the most effective food stamp President in history. That sounds like it is an attack, it’s just a statement of fact. It’s just that his administration kills jobs. They are driving Americans onto food stamps. Most Americans would rather have a paycheck.

If the manifesto is particularly egregious for distorting the statements of Gingrich and Santorum, it is morally irresponsible for refusing to deal with a simple reality: dependency is far too common in the U.S. today, and it’s particularly common in the black community.

For example, in 2009, 25.1% of persons living in black households were receiving food stamps, while only 6.9% of persons in white (non-Hispanic) households got food stamps. Indeed, a bit over half of all blacks (50.9% to be exact) lived in a household getting some means-tested assistance, as opposed to only 20.5% of non-Hispanic whites.(See Table 543 here.)

The numbers, for both blacks and whites, have increased since.

The simple fact is that liberals don’t much mind dependency, since a population dependent on government will vote for the party of government — the Democrats. The people who signed the statement attacking the two Republican candidates don’t particularly mind having a large dependent population. Gingrich and Santorum do.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Attacking the Koch Brothers and Employees: The Kinder Gentler Face of Liberalism

Charles Koch, his brother and employees have in recent months been getting death threats, hundreds of obscenity-laced hate messages, and harassment from some far left-wing groups, Koch said on Thursday.

“We are under attack from various directions, both with threats of violence against us personally, and with threats of attacks on our businesses,” Charles Koch said Thursday, in a phone interview from his office in Wichita.

Koch, the billionaire head of Koch Industries, rarely gives interviews, especially about the various political causes that he and his brother David support. The privately held company rarely releases information about its activities.

On Thursday, Charles Koch authorized employees to reveal the contents of hundreds of e-mails that the Kochs and employees have received in the last year, some of them containing death threats. “I hope you all DIE,” one e-mail, received last year, said. “You people are ruining our country, and all for $$$.” “Choose your expiration Date, Brothers…” said another. “The Koch brothers will DIE!!!!!” said another.

There were hundreds more — some from Wisconsin, where the Kochs were accused of aiding Gov. Scott Walker in his disputes against unions. Most of them were signed with what appear to be real names, many contained obscenities, and some Koch employees said these messages had made them nervous.

‘Occupy Koch Town’

Because of the threats the Kochs have seen in recent months, company representatives have had considerable conversations with Wichita police. They decided to speak out Thursday, only two days before hundreds of “Occupy Koch Town” protesters might show up outside the Koch Industries building in north Wichita. Activists will gather this weekend in Wichita to attend a series of events that will focus on the Keystone Pipeline as well as energy, environmental and climate policies.

Talk Radio Documentary Gets Noticed by Talkers Magazine

We’ve blogged a few times about Brien Farley’s documentary “Liberty or Lies” which examined the Milwaukee conservative talk radio scene.

Now the magazine Talkers has noticed the production, and is featuring it on its front page (the link is to a page that should remain up indefinitely).

Conservative Talk Radio Documentary Getting Attention (and Ratings!) on Public TV in Milwaukee.

Former talk radio producer and talk show host Brien Farley’s new documentary film “Liberty or Lies?” examines the popularity of conservative talk radio in the Milwaukee market. The film was initially a graduate level independent study that took off and eventually found a home on Milwaukee Public Television where a two-hour version of the film premiered on January 30 from 9:00 pm to 11:00 pm and aired again on February 4. Interestingly, Farley’s work on the film began just before Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Republican state officials faced recall elections in 2011 that put the state in the center of the national discourse about public policy relative to public workers’ labor rights. Farley’s film covers talk radio in the market from the perspectives of its biggest local stars, its biggest media critics and many perspectives in between. He tells TALKERS that local response to the film has been excellent noting that public television audience research firm TRAC Media Services reported the film garnered a 1.6 share for the January 30 airing. Farley is an admitted fan of the format and says he believes the Milwaukee news/talk stations serve the market well. “I think the Milwaukee market is a fantastic example of the vibrancy and power of news/talk radio when done right. The programmers at WISN and WTMJ are very tuned into their audiences and responsive to what the people want…which is the real power of the news/talk format. They’ve also corralled some excellent homegrown talent which means a lot to local listeners.” The question, “Why is conservative talk radio successful?” is an ongoing curiosity among many mainstream journalists. In fact it’s a question TALKERS editors are asked almost daily by journalists working in the consumer media. Farley says he believes his film, in many ways, shows Milwaukee to be a microcosm of news/talk’s success on the national level. “AM radio is perhaps the lowest rung of the broadcast venues and yet the impact of the genre is huge! In Wisconsin, this was manifest in the November 2010 election results in which we saw the most comprehensive turnover in power – from Democrat to Republican – of any state in the country. This would not have happened without Milwaukee’s conservative talk radio. And now with the attempted recall of Republican Governor Scott Walker, conservatives, right-leaning independents and converted Democrats are flocking to talk hosts like Jay Weber and Vicki McKenna of WISN and Charlie Sykes and Jeff Wagner of WTMJ to hear the latest and find out what they can do to join the fight. Like it or not, Wisconsin is becoming a very different place because of conservative talk radio. I believe the same can be said of our nation thanks to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin et al.” Read more about Farley’s film and watch it here.

Interestingly, nobody in the Marquette Communications school would agree to supervise this project as a graduate student academic course. So Farley had to come to us in Political Science (he actually needed no supervision, being a seasoned communications professional). Are the faculty in Communications thinking that they goofed? Or do they just wish that conservative talk radio would disappear?

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Daniel Maguire Backs Out of Campus Abortion Debate

When the College Republicans contemplated having a debate on abortion, they asked us for the name of “any faculty that is very strongly pro-choice who would be willing to participant in our event” we obviously thought of Dan Maguire, who is not merely pro-abortion, but incessantly and outspokenly so.

It speaks extremely well of the College Republicans that their first impulse was to have a debate, such that students could listen to both sides.

Margaret Gervase, of the College Republicans, lined up Maguire, and then sent him an e-mail to confirm the arrangements.

I just want to touch bases and make sure we’re on the same page for the debate on March 1st. It’s coming up fast and we are very excited to be hosting the event! Your opponent will be Dr. Mike Adams from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. The debate will be a 20-20-10-10 format; each opponent will get twenty minutes to present their argument and ten minutes for a rebuttal followed by a question/answer wrap-up. Please let me know if you will need a room for preparation beforehand and I will see what I can do to get one adjacent to the ballrooms. Also let me know if you will be needing anything else! Thank you again for offering to do this, we really appreciate it and look forward to it!

I just looked up Dr. Mike Adams and found he is a psychology-criminology professor. I am a theologian presenting theological arguments. I would not try to debate Dr. Adams in psychology/criminology since it is not my field. Similarly he would not want to debate me in theology since he is not a theologians and could not argue a theological position with professional competence. We would be skew lines.

So when you find a theologian who wants to debate me, as was done at Notre Dame, get back in touch.

Dan Maguire

Maguire, in other words, has finked out.

His demand that he will only debate a theologian is a bit odd, since the audience would consist mostly of Marquette students, few of whom would be theology majors. Rather, the debaters would have to make cogent arguments (theological or otherwise) that undergraduates would find compelling.

Is Maguire admitting that he’s not up to that?

His insistence that he will debate only theologians is odd, given that we, over the last couple of decades, have been on two panels with Maguire. One, in the 1990s, was on the death penalty. Two people (us included) debated on the pro-death penalty side, and Maguire (along with another faculty member) were on the anti-death penalty side.

Just a few years ago, we and Maguire were (with several other people) on a panel on health care. It was not explicitly a debate, but panelists were chosen based on opposing perspectives on government run-health care.

Maguire has no special expertise in criminal justice nor in health care, but he was willing to appear.

Are none of the pro-abortion liberals at Marquette willing to take him on? It seems we will find out.

Could it be that people who have lived too long in a left / liberal / politically correct cocoon (as most college faculty have) simply lack the self-confidence to mix it up with somebody who doesn’t buy the assumptions of their culture?

A Democrat? You Don’t Have to Be Embarrassed

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Greece, the Future of America?

Heretofore, debt-defaulting Greece has operated on Raiders of the Lost Ark-logic: “You throw me the idol; I’ll throw you the whip.” Its European Union and International Monetary Fund sugar daddies have tired of sending cash without budget reforms in return. On Thursday, they rejected Greece’s newest amorphous pledge of budget cuts later for billions now. Burned before by big promises with no fulfillment, the Eurogroup sent a clear message to the Greeks through its chair Jean-Claude Juncker: “no disbursement before implementation.”

But with Greece already forcing creditors to take a haircut, and refusing to make good on its pledged reforms, why would European nations agree to throw more good money after bad?

A coalition of Greek political leaders came to an agreement on Thursday to narrow the chasm between revenues and receipts in hopes of paving the way for $172 billion in new loans from the European Union. But EU finance ministers balked at the proposal that contained very little in specified cuts for non-defense-related government expenditures. The European finance ministers demanded from the troubled nation $325 billion in new cuts and parliament’s preapproval of the plan before it will agree to a further bailout. Greece, which is already de facto in default since other nations are paying its creditors, stands to legally default on March 20 if it doesn’t receive a cash infusion.

The refusal to implement promised budgetary and economic structural reforms is a tacit admission that Greek politicians believe the debt crisis just isn’t their fault. This is a popular sentiment within Greece, muted only when going abroad with hat in hand. Foreign bankers, EU bureaucrats, and American capitalists are favorite scapegoats according to internal Greek rhetoric. If outsiders are to blame for the crisis, why should Greeks reform their economic system? It’s everyone else who has the problem, after all, not Greece.

This attitude manifests itself in periodic temper-tantrum street protests and strikes by state workers. Government officials behave similarly in refusing to cut state jobs and services lest they alienate voters and find themselves out of a job. The procrastination seems to be based on the hope that the EU will inflate the currency—as Greece so often did when it controlled its money in the past—and print away the nation’s debts. Given that one in ten Greeks, and one in four employed Greeks, calls government boss, the country’s political leaders have made it nearly impossible to institute meaningful reform. The politicians have bribed the populace into supporting big government, and the populace’s dependence on the behemoth state has made it politically suicidal for politicians to cut into it. Not doing what is personal political suicide is surely national political suicide.

“That’s enough, we can’t take it anymore,” chanted protesters in Athens on Tuesday. The mantra is that there is nothing left to cut. The media is only too willing to repeat it. The New York Times characterized the initial rejected agreement as “a package of harsh austerity measures,” while the UK’s Independent claimed that the “austerity drive has sent unemployment to a record high of 18.2 per cent and the country’s finances into a spiral of recession.”

But Europe’s finance ministers know something that journalists do not. There hasn’t been an austerity drive. Sacrifices have been demanded of taxpayers, such as a 217 percent rise in property taxes. And this deprivation has resulted in three years of negative growth—with a debt-to-GDP ratio set to approach 160 percent this year. But there has been no state austerity program. Greece’s government increased its spending by six percent last year. What is austere about that?

Is there nothing left to cut? Child care is free in Greece. So is university education. Private colleges, and home schooling, are forbidden. The dole is a constitutional right. So is health care, which is provided by the state. The government picks up the tab on trips to the dentist and eye doctor. The country’s 2010 budget identified 74 state-owned enterprises worth 44 billion euros. Workers retire at an average age of 53, with decades of pensions acting as a severe burden on taxpayers.

This attitude manifests itself in periodic temper-tantrum street protests and strikes by state workers. Government officials behave similarly in refusing to cut state jobs and services lest they alienate voters and find themselves out of a job. The procrastination seems to be based on the hope that the EU will inflate the currency—as Greece so often did when it controlled its money in the past—and print away the nation’s debts. Given that one in ten Greeks, and one in four employed Greeks, calls government boss, the country’s political leaders have made it nearly impossible to institute meaningful reform. The politicians have bribed the populace into supporting big government, and the populace’s dependence on the behemoth state has made it politically suicidal for politicians to cut into it. Not doing what is personal political suicide is surely national political suicide.

“That’s enough, we can’t take it anymore,” chanted protesters in Athens on Tuesday. The mantra is that there is nothing left to cut. The media is only too willing to repeat it. The New York Times characterized the initial rejected agreement as “a package of harsh austerity measures,” while the UK’s Independent claimed that the “austerity drive has sent unemployment to a record high of 18.2 per cent and the country’s finances into a spiral of recession.”

But Europe’s finance ministers know something that journalists do not. There hasn’t been an austerity drive. Sacrifices have been demanded of taxpayers, such as a 217 percent rise in property taxes. And this deprivation has resulted in three years of negative growth—with a debt-to-GDP ratio set to approach 160 percent this year. But there has been no state austerity program. Greece’s government increased its spending by six percent last year. What is austere about that?

Is there nothing left to cut? Child care is free in Greece. So is university education. Private colleges, and home schooling, are forbidden. The dole is a constitutional right. So is health care, which is provided by the state. The government picks up the tab on trips to the dentist and eye doctor. The country’s 2010 budget identified 74 state-owned enterprises worth 44 billion euros. Workers retire at an average age of 53, with decades of pensions acting as a severe burden on taxpayers.

“Nothing left to cut” is the rhetoric. Reality is closer to “Nothing has been cut.”

So much of it sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

A bloated public sector, and riots (or near riots) when an effort is made to cut back (read: Madison).

Promises to implement austerity and get things under control that are cavalierly broken (read: Obama budget).

Attempts to find scapegoats to avoid facing reality (read: the one percent).

Attempts to fix the problem with increased taxes (read: Illinois).

Government control of industry (read: General Motors).

Even the outlawing of home schooling, when hasn’t come to American yet, is clearly a battle that will have to be fought, given the fact that liberals view public schools as a means to indoctrinate children into their orthodoxies about homosexuality, global warming, and such.

If the liberals win, nobody can say we didn’t see what the consequences would be.

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Another Campus Racial Hoax

SOMERS — Kenosha County sheriff’s officials are recommending charges be filed against a Kentucky woman who allegedly created a “hit list” of students — including herself — before posting it in a residence hall at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, according to the sheriff’s department.

Detectives are requesting that the Kenosha County District Attorney’s Office file charges against Khalilah N. Ford, 21, of Louisville, after detectives said evidence implicated her amid an investigation into a series of reportedly racially motivated incidents on campus last week, which included two purported nooses and the alleged “hit list.” Ford’s name was released Monday afternoon as the person who created this list of targeted students.

The incidents coincided with the beginning of Black History Month.

If approved, Ford could be charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing an officer, the sheriff’s department stated.

Efforts were made to reach Ford on Monday for comment, but she couldn’t be reached.

A student on Wednesday found a noose-like contraption made from rubber bands and plastic string in the Pike River Suites residence hall, which sheriff’s Sgt. Bill Beth said was “hanging near the trash chute in the middle of the hallway.”

After reporting it, the student — senior Aubriana Banks, 22, of Beloit — said she found a second noose and a threatening note on her door Thursday, according to investigators and Banks. Later that night, fliers containing racial slurs were found listing several black students and Ford by name and stated they were going to die in two days.

Beth on Monday said Ford did not make the nooses.

“The first one was string and rubber bands hanging in the hallway. I guess it was interpreted as a noose by Khalilah and Aubrey,” Beth said. “That’s how they perceived it. But we haven’t heard an explanation” for why nooses would be hung at those locations.

“There was some heated discussion (recently) in a class along racial (lines). I don’t know if that’s related to this,” Beth said.

Ford and Banks are friends, he added.

Investigators don’t know who hung the nooses, Beth said. And they are not even sure whether the contraptions are nooses, he added.

Ford, a junior at Parkside, reportedly confessed Friday evening to making the list after being confronted with evidence pointing to her involvement in this incident, according to the sheriff’s department. However, because of the ongoing investigations, detectives wouldn’t release details about this evidence.

Ford told them she created the “hit list” to draw more attention to the issue, according to investigators. They, in turn, told students the threats were a hoax.

There are certainly cases where this or that black student (or gay student) has been harassed or even attacked. But the politically correct atmosphere of most college campuses (and the imperative that administrators act politically correct, whatever their real opinions should be) creates an incentive for these hoaxes on behalf of victim groups.

“Hate crime” incidents do not result merely in the investigation of the incident, and the punishment of whomever was guilty.

Rather, they are the excuse for escalated demands from the victim group. To combat “hate” it is demanded that a university institute sensitivity training, start an African American studies program (if one does not already exist) or a Queer Studies program (if the purported victim is gay). There are demands for the hiring of more “diverse” faculty, the setting up of committees on “inclusion” and the hiring of campus bureaucrats to cater to this or that politically correct group.

One incident, in other words, can be parlayed into a cornucopia of goodies (or if the goodies don’t come, a cornucopia of grievances).

Thus universities themselves bear much of the blame for these hoaxes, having created a climate where there is a large premium on having a racial (or gay, or Hispanic) grievance.

Saturday, February 04, 2012

Yet More Dissent on Global Warming

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the “pollutant” carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question “cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to “decarbonize” the world’s economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

Anybody who thinks the scientists who signed the statement are somehow margin or unqualified, should read the list of the names and positions.

The simple fact is that “climate scientists” are just a bunch of professors. And like other people (but much more so) the are subject to the influence of ideology, professional self-interest and groupthink.

It was a clear violation of academic freedom, since the complaint didn’t allege we did anything more than debunk statistics that we judge to be bogus. The student who complained didn’t think such statistics should be debunked, apparently since campus rape is a serious problem (and therefore inflating the scope of the problem serves a good purpose).

This past Monday (January 30) McCormick came into our office, and explained that he and Pauly had decided that we were within our rights to say what we said.

So far, so good, it might seem. But not really.

No Written Explanation

McCormick informed us that Pauly was not willing to give us a written explanation of the case, or of the decision. That Marquette would not be willing to put the resolution of the case in writing raises the suspicion that campus bureaucrats might want to revive it in the future, or perhaps fear that it would create a precedent in favor of academic freedom that they might want to ignore at some future date.

Complaint Should Have Been Dropped

We told McCormick that the case should never have been pursued, since if the complaint was taken absolutely at face value, no sexual harassment happened. McCormick replied that he informed us during the office meeting why the case needed to be pursued. We asked him to repeat what his explanation was, and he refused.

In fact, he gave no such explanation. During the office meeting, he explained that perhaps a professor might ask a female student to take all her clothes off, and this would clearly need to be dealt with. But nobody accused us of that. All we were accused of was debunking bogus statistics that feminists produce, and our comments were not even directed at a particular student.

Protect Academic Freedom in the Future

Marquette needs to provide a clear policy that complaints of sexual harassment will not be used in a way that infringes upon academic freedom. Simply saying something, relevant to the course material, that some feminist doesn’t want to hear is clearly protected by academic freedom. Pauly, and Marquette, are unwilling to provide any such statement, something that clearly implies they want to keep open the option of using “sexual harassment” in the future as a pretext to shut up faculty speech that the politically correct crowd does not like.

They doubtless find this option very desirable, especially for use against some faculty member less combative than we are.

Scurrilous Semi-Accusation

Finally, McCormick made a rather scurrilous semi-accusation. He suggested that perhaps we criticized feminists in an “uncivil” way in class. What evidence did he have of that? First, he said we “accused feminists of lying” in our office meeting. What we actually said was that feminists lie about the incidence of rape. That’s a much more limited (and entirely accurate) statement. Secondly, he took exception to the fact that we characterized the person who brought the complaint as a “prissy little feminist” and said that in a properly run university, “some administrator would sit this prissy little feminist down and explain to her ‘this is a university, you are going to hear things you disagree with. Live with it.’”

Of course, we said nothing remotely uncivil in class, and the student didn’t claim that we did.

Liberals, of course, have all kinds of tactics for shutting up speech they don’t like, and if they aren’t willing to escalate to shouting “racist!” or “sexist!” or “homophobe!” will invoke “civility.” McCormick, who is extremely liberal and quite politically correct, seems excessively sensitive to unkind things said about his ideological cohorts.

Conclusion

So it seems that a faculty member can be called into the office of an administrator and required to explain his or her speech, even when nobody has claimed that the faculty member did more than say things that a politically correct student didn’t want to hear.

And while somebody who is willing to make an issue of it (as we were) can prevail, Marquette refuses to renounce the sort of attack on academic freedom.

After all, it’s often prudent for administrators to pander to politically correct faculty, given that they are very numerous, and very vociferous in wanting to shut up speech they dislike.

Thus nothing has been settled, and academic freedom remains in huge danger from Marquette officials.